Communitarian theories of justice essay

Universalism Versus Particularism Communitarians have sought to deflate the universal pretensions of liberal theory. Whereas Rawls seemed to present his theory of justice as universally true, communitarians argued that the standards of justice must be found in forms of life and traditions of particular societies and hence can vary from context to context.

Communitarianism Essay Communitarianism Essay This example Communitarianism Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only.

If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. Communitarianism, like many political terms, has both a general and a specific meaning.

In the general sense, a communitarian is anyone who believes that community is so vital to a worthwhile individual life that it must be protected against threatening trends and tendencies of the modern world.

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Hire Writer Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation the original position with its veil of ignorance within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice. Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favoured principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and right-libertarian accounts.

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As mentioned earlier, both are concerned with the necessity of an individual contributing towards society as a whole.

In the specific sense that emerged from the so-called liberal communitarian debate of the s and s, a communitarian is someone who maintains that the excessively abstract and individualistic theories of liberal philosophers have been among the most threatening of these trends.

This specific sense seems to be what most writers have in mind when they now refer to communitarianism. A Brief History The word communitarian first appeared in English in the early s, when it was roughly synonymous with socialism and communism.

These other words acquired more precise meanings in the ideological battles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but communitarianism remained a vague term, signifying little more than a desire to defend the traditional rural community or small town from the supposedly isolating and corrosive influences of capitalism, bureaucracy, and urban life.

While socialists and communists came to be identified with the political left, communitarians were as likely to be to the right as the left of center.

Communitarianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

According to one line of thought that developed in the late nineteenth century, the primary threat to community is the centrifugal force of modern life. Concern for community took another direction in the twentieth century, as some saw the centripetal force of the modern state as the principal threat to community.

Less dramatically, Robert Nisbet argued in his book The Quest for Community that the free, spontaneous, and healthy life of community is increasingly difficult to sustain under the pressure of the modern state, with its impulses toward centralized power and bureaucratic regulation.

The Liberal-Communitarian Debate These two themes persist in the writings of the communitarian political theorists of recent years, but they take the specific form of a series of objections to the community-dissolving tendencies of liberal individualism.

Four books published in the early s marked the emergence of this philosophical communitarianism: In general, the complaint was that liberal theories of justice and rights, such as those from John Rawls, have been too abstract and universalistic.

This conception is both false and pernicious, communitarians claim, because individual selves are largely constituted by the communities that nurture them. There is little sense of a common good or even a common ground on which citizens can meet. The liberal-communitarian debate has not been clear-cut because some of those labeled communitarian have seen themselves as liberals trying to correct an atomistic tendency within liberalism e.

Moreover, those who seemed the most severe critics of liberalism, MacIntyre and Sandel, have either forsaken communitarianism in favor of republicanism, like Sandel, or denied ever being a communitarian, like MacIntyre. Communitarianism in the specific sense survives, however, although it most often takes the form of a political communitarianism, less concerned with philosophical criticism of liberalism than with attempts to revive and defend community by calling attention to shared values, encouraging participation in civic life, and reinvigorating politics at the local level.

Avineri, Shlomo, and Avner de-Shalit, eds. Oxford University Press, Communitarianism and Its Critics.

Communitarianism | political and social philosophy | initiativeblog.com

The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. The Problems of Communitarian Politics: A Study in Moral Theory.Communitarianism: Communitarianism, social and political philosophy that emphasizes the importance of community in the functioning of political life, in the analysis and evaluation of political institutions, and in understanding human identity and well-being.

It arose in the s as a critique of two prominent. Communitarianism Essay This example Communitarianism Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on . This essay is therefore divided in three parts, and for each part I present the main communitarian claims, followed by an argument (in each part) that philosophical concerns in the s have largely given way to the political concerns that motivated much of the communitarian critique in the first place.

Three Theories of Justice: Utilitarianism, Justice as Fairness, and Libertarianism (1) Utilitarianism A society, according to Utilitarianism, is just to the extent that its laws and institutions are such as to promote the greatest overall or average happiness of its members.

This is the approach to justice from the communitarian. Communitarianism in the last few decades has sparked in popularity among political philosophers. Communitarians believe that political theories, such as classic liberalism, leaves out the importance and significance of the community.

THE COMMUNITARIAN CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM MICHAEL WALZER Institute for A dvanced Study 1. Intellectual fashions are notoriously short-lived, very much like fashions.